A Mellon Graduate Workshop

Civic life in the post-classical Mediterranean depended on performance on a number of levels, including various forms of public spectacle, systems of paideia used to form children into citizens, and public ritual action. This Mellon workshop brings together advanced Ph.D. students in the fields of Religious Studies, Classics, Archaeology, and Performance Studies to investigate the various aspects of performance as it relates to post-classical cultural exchange, including emic definitions and critiques of performance in post-classical culture, the importance of performance in shaping or contesting notions of identity, and the methodological constraints imposed upon our own work when our sources are the result of a highly performative elite literary culture.